James Comey Is ‘Mildly Nauseous’ About the Election. It’s Not Enough.

James B. Comey, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, testifying at a Senate Judiciary Committee oversight hearing on Wednesday.CreditGabriella Demczuk for The New York Times

Being head of a secretive law-enforcement agency probably breeds circumspection, but James Comey, the director of the F.B.I., has taken understatement to a whole new level.

It makes him “mildly nauseous,” he now tells us, to think that he may have affected the outcome of the 2016 election with his decision to announce just days before the vote that he had reopened an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails.

Mildly? He should be sick at heart, because there is no doubt that he affected the election, and it seems pretty obvious that he knew that he would do just that.

Comey, who went from righteous prosecutor to self-righteous politician with his fateful pre-election decision, told a Senate hearing on Wednesday that he would act the same way if had a do-over. That’s deeply unfortunate.

Not only did Comey probably tip the election to Donald Trump; he also handled the investigations of Clinton’s emails and Trump’s strange relationship with the Kremlin in entirely different ways. He treated Trump with the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s customary silence about ongoing probes. He talked about the Clinton investigation in extremely public and damaging ways.

When Comey decided to announce the reopening of the Clinton email probe, he had no solid evidence that there was any significant new information on the newly discovered computer, belonging to the disgraced former congressman Anthony Weiner, that sparked the renewed investigation.

Comey said in his testimony on Wednesday that the computer contained “thousands of emails” that apparently had been forwarded to Weiner by his then-wife Huma Abedin, perhaps Clinton’s closest aide. He repeated the word “thousands” several times, infusing it with a tone of awe. He said some of those messages were “classified” and that they might even have included some of the missing emails from Clinton’s early months as secretary of state. (Subsequent investigation revealed that they did not.)

It was tantalizing speculation, but the word “classified” is not as scary as it sounds, since the federal government wildly over-classifies information. In this case, the term covered emails that merely referred to news articles about classified things — like President Obama’s use of drones to assassinate terrorist suspects, which was about as secret as the address of the White House.

And, of course, Comey had no idea whether those emails, or anything else significant, were on Weiner’s computer. What he should have done was start an investigation and then see what it turned up, without making those actions public. That’s what the F.B.I. normally does, and what it did in the case of the Trump campaign and Russia.

Comey believes, The Times reported in its investigation of the affair, that the F.B.I. should avoid needlessly casting public suspicion on people. Except if those people, apparently, are Hillary Clinton or her aides, friends and associates.

Comey tried to wriggle out of the charge that he had publicly disclosed the reopening of the Clinton investigation, saying he had sent a “private” letter to the lawmakers about it. But that letter became public instantly, as Comey had to know it would.

Comey said he and his aides debated whether to inform Congress about the search warrant, with an election 11 days away. Contemplating the possibility of influencing that vote, Comey said he thought at the time, “Lordy, that would be really bad.”

But he thought that not revealing the new investigation would be “catastrophic.” It’s not clear what catastrophe he had in mind, other than Clinton being elected while the F.B.I. was still looking at the emails, which they miraculously managed to finish doing two days before the vote.

So Comey chose “lordy, that would be bad” over “catastrophic.” He didn’t offer much insight into the difference, other than catastrophic sure sounds worse.

The Times’s investigation of Comey’s handling of the email investigation found that he did not deliberately act out of partisanship. But he certainly handled the Clinton and Trump investigations in different ways that had profound partisan impacts. But even if he wasn’t motivated by partisanship, he showed incredibly bad judgment. For an F.B.I. director, that’s disturbing, too.